Our Travel Blog

Another warm night, and overcast day. The temperature made it up to 18°C before plummeting down to 9°C with plenty of rain. No packing up today!

Lyn headed out to her last craft meeting this morning, and I got a couple of my spreadsheets up to date. After lunch I headed out to fill the truck up with diesel, it’s so much easier without a 36ft trailer on the back. It was at this time the breakdown occurred; I was shopping for a few things in the food store when, inexplicably, a donut leaped into the basket. It looked so lonely I took it back with me. I figured my weight has dropped below my target so this would help stabilise it! The donut was eaten during our afternoon coffee break, and I hid behind the computer so Lyn didn’t suffer.

We headed out for a while to say good-bye to friends, then it was back to clean out the tanks in preparation for travel. The weather at our destination does not appear as bad as forecast, most of the snow seems to have fallen as rain, and the daytime temperatures in the forecast have risen, but there are still a couple of -10°C nights to deal with.

Luckily it’s less than a 4 hour drive tomorrow, so after a waffle breakfast it will hopefully only take a couple of hours to pack up and get on our way. It’ll be a long climb as Williams is at about 7,000ft ASL.

Warm over night and mostly sunny throughout the day with a high of 24°C. We’ve been tracking the weather at the next site, and they don’t seem to be able to work what, and how much, precipitation is going to fall! With the exception of the day we arrive, it looks as though it will be sunny and cold, with night time lows down to -11°C. Should be interesting.

I should have known better, given my luck recently with anything electronic, but I decided to re-install the software on Lyn’s tablet. This was my old one and was filled with so much stuff it barely ran. Well today I decided to take it back to square one and and put new everything on it. That went relatively painlessly, in fact a lot less painlessly than the guy next door trying to drive his motor home away with the hydraulic stabilisers down!

It was little more painful trying to reload the apps as Google insisted that they were already loaded. Finally solved that by giving Lyn a new Google identity. After much frustration things were looking good, all I had to do now was transfer the new identity to her laptop so the book marks on the browsers would sync. Well….. let’s go back a couple of weeks; Lyn managed to accidentally, and irretrievably delete ALL her book marks. We managed to retrieve some from a 2 year old backup and Lyn spent the next few weeks getting them all updated. I suggested she make a backup once the job was finished, but she said she knew what she had done wrong and didn’t need. a backup as she wouldn’t make the same mistake again. Well in changing Lyn’s identity, it wiped out ALL of the bookmarks….. again! Again we recovered them from the 2 year old backup, and Lyn will have to update them all from memory. This time a backup WILL be made.

After lunch we headed out in search of, would you believe, chocolate wine. Friends brought some over the other night and Lyn decided to get some more. We found it, and now have one bottle of dark chocolate and one bottle of milk chocolate.

On the way home we were travelling along Main street Casa Grande, and there is an un-fenced field on the south side with very little vegetation in it, but there were a few hundred sheep wandering around. Surprising as the street is 6 lines wide and Casa Grande is a reasonable size town.

Tomorrow will be a packing day, so in the grand tradition of things the forecasters say rain.

A warm night and overcast skies when we woke up. Grey skies throughout the day and the temperature slowly climbed to 20°C. There may not be any sun but there was plenty of wind to make up for it.

Lyn headed out with a friend to go to some quilt shows the were being held at different RV resorts in town. That was the last I saw of her util after lunch!

I spentthe morning clearing up the mess I had left after my battle with the electrons over the last couple of days. I also managed to tidy up the wiring for the entertainment and internet systems as well as labeling all the various power blocks. I finally have enough power blocks down here that I don’t have to keep taking them back and forth between home and the trailer.

Later in the afternoon four friends came over for a “Happy Hour” which we managed to celebrate outside despite the wind.

Below are a couple of sunset shots Lyn took from the trailer.

Cool and sunny at wake up time, but a return to higher temperatures later in the day with a high of 26°C.

We took advantage of the free breakfast service offered here for the first time this morning, we didn’t do it earlier as we were afraid of making it a habit! We had waffles, orange juice and coffee, not bad for the price and very popular with the residents.

Back at the trailer it was time to continue yesterdays battle. All I was trying to do was add a 4G stick to the internet system here so that we could improve the the Skype and telephone connections. The WiFi here is normally pretty good for downloading, e-Mail and surfing, but lousy for audio and video. I bought a USB stick for T-Mobile off eBay and headed out to the T-Mobile store to get a SIM card and a data plan. Back at the trailer, I managed to get the stick to connect, but only at very slow speeds. The connection was far from perfect and many times the connection could not be made. This was worse than the WiFi. The stick finally gave up and I was not able to connect to the cell network.

A couple of hours later a connection was made again, it seemed to be better this time so I tried a Skype call with Paul and the grand-kids. It was perfect, I was finally happy ……. until I found out that the stick had died and the system reverted back to the resort WiFi!! We must have caught it at a quiet time.

Enough was enough, time to declare the stick dead and start proceedings to get a refund. More research last night and plan B was to get a small MiFi unit, instead of receiving the cell signal and receiving it through USB at the computer, this unit receives the cell signal and converts it to WiFi.

I set it up, but the SIM card was smaller than the one I bought yesterday! There was a SIM card with the unit so I figured it would be easy to have T-Mobile transfer the data allowance from one card to another…. wrong, they are not allowed to do that, “Sorry Sir, you’ll have to throw that data away and buy some more”…. Wrong! A little bit of thinking and a pair of snips seemed to be the answer. I cut the larger card down to the size of the smaller one, and presto the new device now works on the old SIM card. Take that T-Mobile.

The new device works at full 4G speed, and hopefully it will improve the Skype and phone calls.

After I got back this morning, Lyn headed out on her own to do the weekly shopping, I think she was secretly pleased that she was going alone for a change.

After lunch we headed out for some geo-caching. There are many areas around here where sub-divisions have been laid out, roads put in etc, but no houses built as a result of the real estate crash around 2008. These make ideal hiding places for the caches, we got all six of the ones we were looking for. On the way back from there I dropped the USB stick in the mail to get a refund! Hopefully the electrons will learn who is boss.

It’s now midnight, and the internet is sort of back up. The electrons around here have been ganging up on me all day as I tried to get a cell data stick to work. I think I may have won.

This is one of my shorter blogs!

Good night.

A cool(ish) night and a struggle up to 20°C today, but clear blue skies and sunshine with little wind.

Last night we went to a “concert” at the resort, it was billed as a John Denver concert and was performed by a guy from Colorado who spends the winter months travelling around entertaining, and the summer as a park ranger in the Colorado Mountain State Parks. The concert was actually pretty good, not only did he do John Denver songs he also sang a few that he had written himself. A good evenings entertainment and the price was right.

As the wind had finally calmed down I took the quadcopter with its new software for a test flight. Part of the software upgrade requires changing some of the switch positions on the transmitter, shame I forgot about that. The first 10 minutes of flying were great, but then the inevitable happened, I flicked the wrong switch which put me into the super agility (aerobatic) mode. I wasn’t expecting this, and by the time I worked out what had happened I was 2ft above the ground going both forwards and downwards a little too fast! As it hit the ground stones, sand and bits of helicopter went everywhere, but once the dust had settled the only obvious damage was that the battery cover had come off and the battery had come out. The machine was smart enough to know that it had crashed and switched off power to the blades so there was no damage there. I got the switches into the right position, tried a quick flight and all was good. A close inspection back at the trailer showed a couple of cracks in the body, and some stress marks as well. Maybe time for a new body.

After lunch we headed south towards Tucson to visit Pinal Air Park. This is home to one of the many boneyards in the Arizona and California deserts where aircraft come to die, or be stored in the dry desert air.

General Views

These ones came here to die

 National Guard Helicopter Training in the Circuit

On the way back we planned to do some geo-caching in the mountains south of Casa Grande, unfortunately the road we were following to get to the start point stopped at the local funeral directors. We figured that was enough of  boneyards for the day.

Woke up this morning to clear blue skies to the west and black clouds overhead and to the east. It had rained overnight, and  was now clearing. The mountains in the distance that are normally shrouded in haze were nice and clear. The downside was a maximum temperature of 16°C. Still on the weather front (groan), the 50cm of snow expected for our next stop is down to 10cm already! Well done those forecasters.

After breakfast we headed north to the outskirts of Phoenix, Lyn wanted to drop into Hobby Lobby, not to buy anything but to return something…. must be a first!

From there we headed over to get my truck gauge reprogrammed, which took all of 5 minutes. Finally over to Costco to get some coffee. We went on the I-10, but returned on the back roads; back roads in this case being 6+ lane roads going through sub divisions. As I have said before, they do know how to build roads down here.

Back at the resort, the wind was still to strong to fly or paint, and it was a little to cool to spend much time outside. Luckily we both have enough hobbies to keep us occupied inside.

We headed off for a short (~1 mile) walk around the resort just before having some coffee, then settled back down hobbying (new word).

Tonight is the highlight of this weeks social calendar, a John Denver concert!